PART II

The Commercial Force and the Economic

Revolution

VIII

WORLD CONDITIONS THAT ARE AFFECTING CHINA[20]

[20] Part of this chapter appeared as an article in the American Monthly

Review of Reviews, October, 1904.

SEVERAL outside forces have pressed steadily and heavily

upon the exclusiveness and conservatism of the

Chinese, and though they have not yet succeeded in

changing the essential character of the nation, they have set

in motion vast movements which have already convulsed great

sections of the Empire and which are destined to affect stupendous

transformations. The first of these forces is foreign

commerce.

To understand the operation of this force, we must consider

that its impact has been enormously increased by the extension

of facilities for intercommunication. The extent to which these

have revolutionized the world is one of the most extraordinary

features of our extraordinary age. It is startlingly significant

of the change that has taken place that Russia and Japan, nations

7,000 miles apart by land and a still greater distance by

water, are able in the opening years of the twentieth century

to wage war in a region which one army can reach in four

weeks and the other in four days, and that all the rest of the

world can receive daily information as to the progress of the

conflict. A half century ago, Russia could no more have sent

a large army to Manchuria than to the moon, while down to

the opening of her ports by Commodore Perry in 1854, the few

wooden vessels that made the long journey to Japan found an

unprogressive and bitterly anti-foreign heathen nation with an

edict issued in 1638 still on its statute books declaring--``So

long as the sun shall continue to warm the earth, let no Christian

be so bold as to come to Japan; and let all know that the

King of Spain himself, or the Christian's God, or the great God

of all, if He dare violate this command, shall pay for it with

his head.''

Nor were other far-eastern peoples any more hospitable.

China, save for a few port cities, was as impenetrable as when

in 1552 the dying Xavier had cried--``O Rock, Rock, when

wilt thou open!'' Siam excluded all foreigners until the century's

first quarter had passed, and Laos saw no white man till

1868. A handful of British traders were so greedily determined

to keep all India as a private commercial preserve that,

forgetting their own indebtedness to Christianity, they sneered

at the proposal to send missionaries to India as ``the maddest,

most expensive, most unwarranted project ever proposed by a

lunatic enthusiast,'' while as late as 1857, a director of the

East India Company declared that ``he would rather see a band

of devils in India than a band of missionaries.'' Korea was

rightly called ``the hermit nation'' until 1882; and as for

Africa, it was not till 1873 that the world learned of that part

of it in which the heroic Livingstone died on his knees, not till

1877 that Stanley staggered into a West Coast settlement after

a desperate journey of 999 days from Zanzibar through Central

Africa, not till 1884 that the Berlin Conference formed the

International Association of the Congo guaranteeing that which

has not yet been realized ``liberty of conscience'' and ``the

free and public exercise of every creed.''

Even in America within the memory of men still living, the

lumbering, white-topped ``prairie schooner'' was the only

conveyance for the tedious overland journey to California.

Hardy frontiersmen were fighting Indians in the Mississippi

Valley, and the bold Whitman was ``half a year'' in bearing a

message from Oregon to Washington.

The Hon. John W. Foster tells us in his ``Century of American

Diplomacy'' that ``General Lane, the first territorial governor

of Oregon, left his home in Indiana, August 27, 1848,

and desiring to reach his destination as soon as possible, travelling

overland to San Francisco and thence by ship, reached his

post on the first of March following--the journey occupying

six months. At the time our treaty of peace and independence

was signed in 1783, two stage-coaches were sufficient for all the

passengers and nearly all the freight between New York and

Boston.'' It is only seventy years since the Rev. John Lowrie,

with his bride and Mr. and Mrs. Reed, rode horseback from

Pittsburg through flooded rivers and over the Allegheny

Mountains to Philadelphia, whence it took them four and

a-half months to reach Calcutta.

Nor was this all, for scores of the conveniences and even

necessities of our modern life were unknown at the beginning

of the nineteenth century. To get some idea of the vastness

of the revolution in the conditions of living, we have but to

remind ourselves that ``in the year 1800 no steamer ploughed

the waters; no locomotive traversed an inch of soil; no photographic

plate had ever been kissed by sunlight; no telephone

had ever talked from town to town; steam had never driven

mighty mills and electric currents had never been harnessed

into telegraph and trolley wires.''[21] ``In all the land there was no

power loom, no power press, no large manufactory in textiles,

wood or iron, no canal. The possibilities of electricity in

light, heat and power were unknown and unsuspected. The

cotton gin had just begun its revolutionary work. Intercommunication

was difficult, the postal service slow and costly,

literature scanty and mostly of inferior quality.''[22]

[21] The Rev. Dr. Theodore Cuyler.

[22] Address of the Bishops of the M. E. Church, 1900.

How marvellously the application of steam as a motive

power has united once widely separated regions. So swiftly

have the changes come and so quickly have we adapted ourselves

to them that it is difficult to realize the magnitude of the

transformation that has been achieved. We can ride from

Pittsburg to Philadelphia in eight hours and to Calcutta in

twenty-two days. The journey across our own continent is no

longer marked by the ox-cart and the campfire and the bones

of perished expeditions. It is simply a pleasant trip of less

than a week, and in an emergency in August, 1903, Henry P.

Lowe travelled from New York to Los Angeles, 3,241 miles, in

seventy-three hours and twenty-one minutes. Populous states

covered with a network of railway and telegraph lines invite

the nations of the world to join them in celebrating at St.

Louis the ``Purchase'' of a region which a hundred years ago

was as foreign to the American people as the Philippines now

are. The Rev. Dr. Calvin Mateer, who in 1863 was six

months in reaching Chefoo, China, on a voyage from whose

hardships his wife never fully recovered, returned in a comfortable

journey of one month in 1902. To-day, for all practical

purposes, China is nearer New York than California once

was.

No waters are too remote for the modern steamer. Its smoke

trails across every sea and far up every navigable stream. Ten

mail steamers regularly run on the Siberian Yenisei, while the

Obi, flowing from the snows of the Little Altai Mountains,

bears 302 steam vessels on various parts of its 2,000-mile

journey to the Obi Gulf on the Arctic Ocean. Stanley could

now go from Glasgow to Stanley Falls in forty-three days.

Already there are forty-six steamers on the Upper Congo.

From Cape Town, a railway 2,000 miles long runs via Bulawayo

to Beira on the Portuguese coast, while branch lines reach

several formerly inaccessible mining and agricultural regions.

June 22, 1904, almost the whole population of Cape Town

cheered the departure of the first through train for Victoria

Falls, where the British Association for the Advancement of

Science has been invited to meet in 1905. Uganda is reached

by rail. Five hundred and eighty miles of track unite Mombasa

and Victoria Nyanza. Sleeping and dining cars safely

run the 575 miles from Cairo to Khartoum where only five

years ago Lord Kitchener fought the savage hordes of the

Mahdi. The Englishman's dream of a railroad from Cairo to

the Cape is more than half realized, for 2,800 miles are already

completed. In 1903, Japan had 4,237 miles of well managed

railways which in 1902 carried 111,211,208 passengers

14,409,752 tons of freight. India is gridironed by 25,373

miles of steel rails which in 1901 carried 195,000,000 passengers.

A railroad parallels the Burmese Irrawaddy to Bhamo and

Mandalay. In Siam you can ride by rail from Bangkok northward

to Korat and westward to Petchaburee. The Trans-

Siberian Railway now connects St. Petersburg and Peking. In

Korea, the line from Chemulpho to Seoul connects with lines

under construction both southward and northward, so that ere

long one can journey by rail from Fusan on the Korean Strait

to Wiju on the Yalu River. As the former is but ten hours by

sea from Japan and as the latter is to form a junction with the

Trans-Siberian Railway, a land journey in a sleeping car will

soon be practicable from London and Paris to the capitals of

China and Korea, and, save for the ferry across the Korean

Strait, to any part of the Mikado's kingdom. The locomotive

runs noisily from Jaffa to venerable Jerusalem and from Beirut

over the passes of Lebanon to Damascus, the oldest city in the

world. A projected line will run from there to the Mohammedan

Mecca, so that soon the Moslem pilgrims will abandon

the camel for the passenger coach. Most wonderful of all is

the Anatolian Railway which is to run through the heart of

Asia Minor, traversing the Karamanian plateau, the Taurus

Mountains and the Cilician valleys to Haran where Abraham

tarried, and Nineveh where Jonah preached, and Babylon

where Nebuchadnezzar made an image of gold, and Bagdad

where Haroun-al-Raschid ruled, to Koweit on the Persian Gulf.

In a single month forty-five Philadelphia engines have been

ordered for India. The American locomotive is to-day speeding

across the steppes of Siberia, through the valleys of Japan,

across the uplands of Burmah and around the mountainsides

of South America. ``Yankee bridge-builders have cast up a

highway in the desert where the chariot of Cambyses was

swallowed up by the sands. The steel of Pennsylvania spans

the Atbara, makes a road to Meroe,'' and crosses the rivers of

Peru. Trains on the two imperial highways of Africa--the

one from Cairo to the Cape and the other from the upper Nile

to the Red Sea--are to be hauled by American engines over

American bridges, while the ``forty centuries'' which Napoleon

Bonaparte said looked down from the pyramids see not the

soldiers of France, but the manufacturing agents of Europe and

America. Whether or not we are to have a political imperialism,

we already have an industrial imperialism.

Walter J. Ballard declares[23] that the aggregate capital invested

in railways at the end of 1902 was $36,850,000,000 and

that the total mileage was 532,500 distributed as follows:--

Miles

United States ................... 202,471

Europe .......................... 180,708

Asia ............................ 41,814

South America ................... 28,654

North America (Except U. S.) .... 24,032

Australia ....................... 15,649

Africa .......................... 14,187

[23] New York Sun, July 13, 1903.

Jules Verne's story, ``Around the World in Eighty Days''

was deemed fantastic in 1873. But in 1903, James Willis

Sayre of Seattle, Washington, travelled completely around the

world in fifty-four days and nine hours, while the Russian

Minister of Railroads issues the following schedule of

possibilities when the Trans-Siberian Railroad has completed its

plans:--

From St. Petersburg to Vladivostok ..... 10 days

`` Vladivostok to San Francisco ....... 10 ``

`` San Francisco to New York .......... 4<1/2> ``

`` New York to Bremen ................. 7 ``

`` Bremen to St. Petersburg ........... 1<1/2> ``

-----

Total ............................. 33 days

As for the risks incident to such a tour, it is significant that

for my own journey around the world, a conservative insurance

company, for a consideration of only fifty dollars, guaranteed

for a year to indemnify me in case of incapacitating accident to

the extent of fifty dollars a week and in case of death to pay

my heirs $10,000. And the company made money on the

arrangement, for I met with neither illness nor accident. With

a very few unimportant exceptions, there are now no hermit

nations, for the remotest lands are within quick and easy reach.

And now electricity has ushered in an era more wondrous

still. Trolley cars run through the streets of Seoul and

Bangkok. The Empress Dowager of China wires her decrees

to the Provincial Governors. Telegraph lines belt the globe,

enabling even the provincial journal to print the news of the

entire world during the preceding twenty-four hours. We

know to-day what occurred yesterday in Tokyo and Beirut,

Shanghai and Batanga. The total length of all telegraph

lines in the world is 4,908,921 miles,--the nerves of our

modern civilization. And it is remarkable not only that

Europe has 1,764,790 miles, America 2,516,548 miles and

Australia 277,419 miles, but that Africa has 99,409 miles and

Asia 310,685 miles, Japan alone having, in 1903, 84,000 miles

beside 108,000 miles of telephone wires.

I found the telegraph in Siam and Korea, in China and the

Philippines, in Burma, India, Arabia, Egypt and Palestine.

Camping one night in far Northern Laos after a toilsome ride

on elephants, I realized that I was 12,500 miles from home, at

as remote a point almost as it would be possible for man to

reach. All about was the wilderness, relieved only by the few

houses of a small village. But walking into that tiny hamlet, I

found at the police station a telephone connecting with the

telegraph office at Chieng-mai, so that, though I was on the

other side of the planet, I could have sent a telegram to my

New York office in a few minutes. Nor was this an exceptional

experience, for the telegraph is all over Laos, as indeed

it is over many other Asiatic lands.

From the recesses of Africa comes the report that the Congo

telegraph line, which will ultimately stretch across the entire

belt of Central Africa, already runs 800 miles up the Congo

River from the ocean to Kwamouth, the junction of the

Kassai and Congo Rivers. A Belgian paper states that ``a

telegram dispatched from Kwamouth on January 15th was

delivered at Boma half an hour later. For the future, the

Kassai is thus placed in direct and rapid communication with

the seat of Government, and Europe is also brought close to the

centre of Africa. Only a few years ago, news took at least two

months to reach Boma from the Kassai, and the reply would

not be received under another two months, and this only if the

parties were available and the steamer ready to start.''

More significant still are the submarine cables which aggregate

1,751 in number and over 200,000 miles in length and

which annually transmit more than 6,000,000 messages,

annihilating the time and distance which formerly separated

nations. When King William IV of England died in 1837,

the news was thirty-five days in reaching America. But when

Queen Victoria passed away January 22, 1901, at 6:30 P. M.,

the afternoon papers describing the event were being sold in

the streets of New York at 3:30 P. M. of the same day! As I

rose to address a union meeting of the English speaking residents

of Canton, China, on that fateful September day of 1901,

a message was handed me which read, ``President McKinley is

dead.'' So that by means of the submarine cable, that little

company of Englishmen and Americans in far-off China bowed

in grief and prayer simultaneously with multitudes in the home

land.

Not only Europe and America, but Siberia and Australia,

New Zealand and New Caledonia, Korea and the Kameruns,

Laos and Persia are within the sweep of this modern system of

intercommunication. The latest as well as one of the most

important links in this world system is the Commercial

Pacific Cable between Manila and San Francisco.

President Roosevelt gave a significant illustration of the perfection

of this system when, on the completion of the

Commercial Pacific Cable July 4, 1903, he flashed a message

around the earth in twelve minutes, while a second message

sent by Clarence H. Mackay, President of the Pacific Cable

Company, made the circuit of the earth in nine minutes.

What additional possibilities are involved in the wireless

system of telegraphy we can only conjecture, but it is already

apparent that this system has passed the experimental stage

and that it is destined to achieve still more amazing results. A

startling illustration of its possibilities was given by the

Japanese fleet March 22, 1904. A cruiser lay off Port Arthur

and by wireless messages enabled battleships, riding safely

eight miles away, to bombard fortifications which they could

not see and which could not see them.

Commerce has taken swift and massive advantages of these

facilities for intercommunication. Its ships whiten every sea.

The products of European and American manufacture are

flooding the earth. The United States Treasury Bureau of

Statistics (1903) estimates that the value of the manufactured

articles which enter into the international commerce of the

world is four billions of dollars and that of this vast total, the

United States furnishes 400,000,000, its foreign trade having

increased over 100 per cent. since 1895. While the bulk of

the foreign trade of the United States is with Europe, American

business men are gradually awaking to the greatness of their

opportunity in Asia. A characteristic example of their aggressiveness

was given when President James J. Hill, of the Great

Northern Railroad, testified before a Government Commission,

October 20, 1902:--

``We arranged with a line of steamers to connect with our road so that

we could get the Oriental outlet. I remember when the Japanese were

going to buy rails, I asked them where they were going to buy, and they

said in England or Belgium. I asked them to wait until I telegraphed.

I wired and made the rates, so that we made the price $1.50 a ton lower

and sold for America 40,000 tons of rails. Then I got them to try a little

of the American cotton, telling them if it was not satisfactory I would pay

for the cotton, and the result was satisfactory.''

In these ways, the interrelation of nations is becoming

closer and closer, their separation from the world's life more

and more difficult. Dr. Josiah Strong well observes:--

``Until the nineteenth century, there was but little contact between

different peoples throughout the world. They were separated, not only

by distances hard to overcome, but by differences of speech, of faith, of

mental habit and mode of life, of custom and costume, of government and

law, and isolation tended steadily to emphasize the divergence which already

existed. Thus increasing differences of environment perpetuated

and intensified the differences of civilization which they had created. In

other words, until the nineteenth century, the stream of tendency down

all the ages was towards diversity. Then came the change, the results

of which are, in their magnitude and importance, beyond calculation.

Steam annihilated nine-tenths of space, and electricity has cancelled the

remainder. Isolation is, therefore, becoming impossible, for the world is

now a neighbourhood. This means that differences of environment will,

from this time on, become constantly less. The swift ships of commerce

are mighty shuttles which are weaving the nations together into one great

web of life.''

IX

THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION IN ASIA[24]

THE result of the operation of this commercial force is

an economic revolution of vast proportions. When

ever I went in Asia, I found wider interest in this subject

than in the aggressions of European nations. The reason

is obvious. The common people in Asia care little for politics,

but the price of food and raiment touches every man, woman

and child at a sensitive point. Almost everywhere, the old

days of cheap living are passing away. Steamers, railways,

telegraphs, newspapers, labour-saving machinery, and the introduction

of western ideas are slowly but surely revolutionizing

the Orient. Shantung wheat, which formerly had no market

beyond a radius of a few dozen miles from the wheat-field, can

now be shipped by railroad and steamship to any part of the

world, and every Chinese buyer has to pay more for it in consequence.

In like manner new facilities for export have doubled,

trebled and, in some places, quadrupled the price of rice in

China, Siam and Japan. The Consul-General of the United

States at Shanghai reports that the prices of seventeen staple

articles of export have increased sixteen per cent. in twenty

years while in Japan the increase in the same articles for the

same period was thirty-one per cent.[25]

[24] Part of this chapter appeared as an article in the Century Magazine,

March, 1904.

[25] ``Commercial China,'' p. 2902.

The depreciation in the value of silver has still further complicated

the situation. The common Chinese tael, which formerly

bought from 1,500 to 1,800 cash (the current coin of

China), now buys only 950 cash. The Shanghai tael brings

897 cash, and the Mexican dollar only 665. This of course,

means that the common people, who use only cash, have to pay

a larger number of them for the necessaries of life. The same

difficulty is being felt to a greater or less extent in many other

countries of Asia, while in China, an already serious advance

in prices is being heightened by the heavy import taxes which

have been levied to meet the indemnity imposed by the Western

Powers on account of the Boxer outbreak.

The prices of labour and materials have sharply advanced in

consequence of the enormous demands incident to the construction

of railways, with their stations, shops and round-houses,

the vast engineering schemes of the Germans at Tsing-tau, the

British at Wei-hai Wei and the Russians at Port Arthur, the

extensive scale on which the Legations have rebuilt in Peking,

the reconstruction of virtually the entire business portions of

both Peking and Tien-tsin, as well as the coincident rebuilding

of the mission stations of all denominations, Protestant and

Catholic. It will be readily understood what all this activity

means in a land where there are as yet but limited supplies of

the kind of skilled labourers required for foreign buildings, and

where the requisite materials must be imported from Europe

and America by firms who ``are not in China for their health.''

It is futile to hope that the competition will be materially less

next year, or the year after, or the year after that. Commerce

and politics are planning works in China which will not be completed

for many years. Railway officials told me of projected

lines which will require decades for construction. China has

entered upon an era of commercial development. The Western

world has come to stay, and while there may be temporary

reactions, as there have been at home, prices are not likely to

return to their former level. There are vast interior regions

which will not be affected for an indefinite period, but for the

coast provinces, primitive conditions are passing forever.

The knowledge of modern inventions and of other foods

and articles has created new wants. The Chinese peasant is no

longer content to burn bean oil; he wants kerosene. In

scores of humble Laos homes and markets I saw American

lamps costing twenty rupees apiece, and a magistrate proudly

showed me a collection of nineteen of these shining articles.

Forty thousand dollars worth of these lamps were sold in Siam

last year. The narrow streets of Canton are brilliant with German

chandeliers and myriads of private houses throughout the

Empire are lighted by foreign lamps. The desire of the

Asiatic to possess foreign lamps is only equalled by his passion

for foreign clocks. I counted twenty-seven in the private

apartments of the Emperor of China and my wife counted

nineteen in a single room of the Empress Dowager's palace,

while cheaper ones tick to the delighted wonder of myriads of

humbler people. The ambitious Syrian scorns the mud roof

of his ancestors and will only be satisfied with bright red tiles

imported from France. In almost every Asiatic city I visited,

I found shops crowded with articles of foreign manufacture.

``Made in Germany'' is as familiar a phrase in Siam as in

America. Many children in China are arrayed only in the atmosphere,

but when I was in Taian-fu, in the far interior of

Shantung, hundreds of parents were in consternation because

the magistrate had just placarded the walls with an edict announcing

that hereafter boys and girls must wear clothes and

that they would be arrested if found on the streets naked. At

a banquet given to the foreign ministers by the Emperor and

the Empress Dowager in the famous Summer Palace twelve

miles from Peking, the distinguished guests cut York ham with

Sheffield knives and drank French wines out of German glasses.

Everywhere articles of foreign manufacture are in demand,

and shrewd Chinese merchants are stocking their shops with

increasing quantities of European and American goods. The

new Chinese Presbyterian Church at Wei-hsien typifies the elements

that are entering Asia for it contains Chinese brick,

Oregon fir beams, German steel binding-plates and rods, Belgian

glass, Manchurian pine pews, and British cement.

India is eagerly buying American rifles, tools, boots and

shoes, while vast regions which depend upon irrigation are becoming

interested in American well-boring outfits. Persia is

demanding increasing quantities of American padlocks, sewing-

machines and agricultural implements. German, English and

American machinery is equipping great cotton factories in

Japan. I saw Russian and American oil tins in the remotest

villages of Korea. Strolling along the river bank one evening

in Paknampo, Siam, I heard a familiar whirring sound and

entering found a bare-legged Siamese busily at work on a sewing-

machine of American make. Nearly five hundred of them

are sold in Siam every year, and I found them in most of the

cities that I visited in other Asiatic countries. When I left

Lampoon on an elephant, six hundred miles north of Bangkok,

a Laos gentleman rode beside me for several miles on an American

bicycle. There are thousands of them in Siam. His

Majesty himself frequently rides one and His Royal Highness,

Prince Damrong, is president of a bicycle club of four hundred

members. The king's palace is lighted by electricity and the

Government buildings are equipped with telephones, and as the

nobles and merchants see the brilliancy of the former and the

convenience of the latter, they want them, too. In many

parts of Asia people, who but a decade or two ago were satisfied

with the crudest appliances of primitive life, are now

learning to use steam and electrical machinery, to like Oregon

flour, Chicago beef, Pittsburg pickles and London jam, and to

see the utility of foreign wire, nails, cutlery, drugs, paints and

chemicals.

Many other illustrations of a changed condition might be

cited. Knowledge increases wants and the Oriental is acquiring

knowledge. He demands a hundred things to-day that his

grandfather never heard of, and when he goes to the shops to

buy his daily food, he finds that the new market for it which

the foreigner has opened has increased the price.

Americans are the very last people who can consistently

criticise this tendency in Asia. It is the foreigner who has

created it, and the American is the most prodigal of all foreigners.

I never realized until I visited other lands how extravagant

is the scale of American life, not only among the

rich, but the so-called poor. My morning walk to my New

York office takes me along Christopher Street, and I have often

seen in the garbage cans of tenement houses pieces of bread

and meat and half-eaten vegetables and fruit that would give

the average Asiatic the feast of a lifetime. In Europe, Americans

are notorious as spendthrifts. In the Philippine Islands,

they have thrown about their money in a way which has inaugurated

an era of reckless lavishness comparable only to the

California days of ``forty-nine.'' In the port cities of China,

the porters asked me extortionate prices because I was an

American. Two or three coolies would seize a suit case or

change it from man to man every few minutes, on the pretense

that it was heavy. In Tien-tsin, you hire a jinrikisha and

presently you find a second man pushing behind, though the

road is smooth as a floor. In a few minutes a third appears to

push on the other side, and once a fourth took hold between

the second and third. All of course demand pay, and it is

difficult to shake them off. They do not understand your protests,

or they pretend not to, and you have to be emphatic to

get rid of them. At Tong-ku, my sampan men calmly insisted

on two dollars for a service that was worth but forty cents.

Everywhere, I found that it was wiser to make all purchases

and bargains through trusty native Christians, or to ascertain

in advance what a given service was really worth, pay it and

walk off, deaf to all protestations and complaints, even though

as in Seoul, Korea, the men plaintively sat around for hours.

In Cairo, a certain hotel charged me on the supposition that

because I was an American, I was a millionaire or a fool--perhaps

both. True, we have hack-drivers and hotel-keepers in

America who are equally rapacious, and a New Yorker in particular

need not go away from home to be overcharged. But

it is just because we have become so accustomed to this careless

profusion at home that we exhibit it abroad.

But it is useless to protest against the increased cost of living

in Asia. It is as much beyond individual control as the tides.

The causes which are producing it are not even national but

cosmopolitan.

Nor should we ignore the fact that this movement is, in

some respects at least, beneficial. It means a higher and

broader scale of life and such a life always costs more than a

low and narrow one. This economic revolution in Asia is a

concomitant of a Christian civilization which brings not only

higher prices but wider intellectual and spiritual horizons, a

general enlarging and uplifting of the whole range of life.

There are indeed some vicious influences accompanying this

movement, as brighter lights usually have deeper shadows.

But surely it is for good and not for evil that the farmers of

Hunan can now ship their peanuts to England and with the

proceeds vary the eternal monotony of a rice-diet; that the

girls of Siam are being taught by missionary example that

modesty requires the purchase of a garment for street wear

which will cover at least the breasts; that the Korean should

learn that it is better to have a larger house so that the girls of

the family need not sleep in the same room as the boys; and

that all China should discover the advantages of roads over

rutty, corkscrew paths, of sanitation over heaps of putrid garbage

and of wooden floors over filth-encrusted ground. Christianity

inevitably involves some of these things, and to some

extent the awakening of Asia to the need of them is a part of

the beneficent influence of a gospel which always and everywhere

renders men dissatisfied with a narrow, squalid existence.

To make a man decent morally is to beget in him a

desire to be decent physically.

The native Christians, especially the pastors and teachers,

are the very ones who first feel this movement towards a

higher physical life. Nor should we repress it in them, for it

means an environment more favourable to morals and to the

stability of Christian character as well as a healthful example

to the community in which they live. To say, therefore, that

the average annual income of a Hindu is rupees twenty-seven

(nine dollars) is not to adduce a reason for holding the pastors

and evangelists of India down to that scale. They should, indeed,

live near enough to the plane of their countrymen to keep

in sympathetic touch with them. But they should not be expected

or allowed to huddle in the dark, unventilated hovels of

the masses of the people, or, by confining themselves to one

scanty meal a day, have that gaunt, half-famished look which

makes my heart ache every time I think of the walking skeletons

I saw in India. I am not ashamed but proud of the fact

that it costs the average Christian more to live in Asia than it

costs the average heathen, that the houses of the Laos Christians

are better than the single-roomed sheds about them, that

the graduates of our Siam mission schools for girls wear shirt

waists instead of sunshine, that the members of any one of our

Korean churches spend more money on soap than a whole village

of their heathen neighbours whose bodies are caked with

the accumulations of years of neglect, that the sessions of our

Syrian churches are Christian gentlemen in appearance as well

as in fact, and that the houses of our Chinese Christians do not

mix pigs, chickens and babies in one lousy, malodorous

company.

But these altered conditions have not yet brought the ability

to meet them. The cost of living has increased faster than the

resources of the people. Only France and Russia are primarily

political in their foreign policy. England, Germany and

the United States are avowedly commercial. They talk incessantly

about ``the open door.'' Their supreme object in Asia

is to ``extend their markets.'' They are producing more than

they can use themselves, and they seek an opportunity to dispose

of their surplus products. They are less concerned to

bring the products of Asia into their own territories.

Indeed, Germany and particularly the United States have

built a tariff wall about themselves, expressly to protect

home industries from outside competition, and not a few

American manufacturers have recently been on the verge of

panic on account of Japanese competition. Europe and America

are trying to force their own manufactures on to Asia and

to take in return only what they please.

In time, this will probably right itself, in part at least.

While the farmers of the Mississippi Valley find living much

more expensive than it was two generations ago, they also find

that they get more for their wheat and that they eat better food

and wear better clothes and build better houses than their

grandfathers. The era of railroads ended the days of cheap

living, but it ended as well days when the farmer had to confine

himself to a diet of corn-bread and salt pork, when his

home was destitute of comforts and his children had little

schooling and no books. So the American working man of today

has to pay more for the necessaries of life than the working

man of Europe, but he is nevertheless the best paid, the

best fed, the best clothed and the best housed working man in

the world, a far better and more intelligent citizen because of

these very conditions.

The same changes will doubtless take place in Asia. That

great continent is capable of producing enormous quantities of

food, minerals and both raw and manufactured articles which

the rest of the world will sooner or later want. Already this

foreign demand is bringing comparative wealth to the rug

dealers of Syria, the silk embroiderers of China and the cloisonne'

and porcelain makers of Japan. But only an infinitesimal

part of the total population has thus far profited largely by

this wider market. Where one man amasses wealth in this

way, 100,000 men find that aggressive foreign traders exploit

their wares by flooding the shops with tempting articles which

they can ill-afford to buy. The difficulty is rapidly becoming

acute. My inquiries in Japan led me to the conclusion that

while the cost of the staple articles of living has increased

nearly 100 per cent. in the last twenty years, the financial ability

of the average Japanese has not increased thirty per cent.

In China, Siam, India, the Philippine Islands, and Syria I

found substantially similar anxieties though the proportions

naturally varied. ``True, there has been commerce since the

early ages, but caravans could afford to carry only precious

goods, like fine fabrics, spices and gems. These luxuries did

not reach the multitude, and could not materially change environment.

But modern commerce scatters over all the world

the products of every climate, in ever increasing quantities.''

So the economic revolution in Asia is characterized, as such

revolutions usually are in Europe and America, by wide-spread

unrest and, in some places, by violence. The oldest of continents

is the latest to undergo the throes of the stupendous

transformation from which the newest is slowly beginning to

emerge. The transition period in Asia will be longer and perhaps

more trying, as the numbers involved are vaster and more

conservative; but the ultimate result cannot fail to be beneficial

both to Asia and to the whole world.

It is therefore too late to discuss the question whether the

character and religions of these nations should be disturbed.

They have already been disturbed by the inrush of new ideas

and by the ways as well as by the products of the white man.

Like their ancient temples, the religions of Asia are cracking

from pinnacle to foundation. The natives themselves realize

that the old days are passing forever. India is in a ferment.

Japan has leaped to world prominence. The power of the

Mahdi has been broken and the Soudan has been opened to

civilization. The King of Siam has made Sunday a legal holiday

and is frightening his conservative subjects by his revolutionary

changes, while Korea is changing with kaleidoscopic

rapidity.

Whereas the opening years of the sixteenth century saw the

struggle for civilization, of the seventeenth century for religious

liberty, of the eighteenth century for constitutional government,

of the nineteenth century for political freedom, the

opening years of the twentieth century witness what Lowell

would have called:--

``One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt

Old systems and the word.''

X

FOREIGN TRADE AND FOREIGN VICES

THE influences that are thus surging into the Middle

Kingdom are tremendous. The beginnings of China's

foreign trade date back to the third century, though

it was not until comparatively recent years that it grew to large

proportions. To-day the leading seaports of China have many

great business houses handling vast quantities of European and

American goods. The most persistent effort is made to extend

commerce with the Chinese. That the effort is successful is

shown by the fact that the foreign trade of China increased

from 217,183,960 taels in 1888 to 583,547,291 taels in 1904.

This shows the enormous gain of 168 per cent., though this is

slightly modified by the fact that the report for 1904 includes

goods to the value of 402,639 taels carried by Chinese vessels

which, though plying between native and foreign ports, were

not formerly reported through the customs. According to

official reports,[26] the foreign trade of China has been growing

rapidly during recent years, the only falling off having been

in the Boxer outbreak year 1900. In 1891, the imports into

China were, in round numbers, 134,000,000 taels and the

exports were 101,000,000, a total of 235,000,000, and an

excess of imports of 33 per cent. In 1904 the imports had

advanced to 344,060,608 taels and the exports to 239,486,683

taels, a total of 583,547,291 taels, an increase of 148 per cent.

and an excess of imports of 44 per cent. In 1899 the total

foreign trade of China had reached 460,000,000 taels. The

next year it dropped to 370,000,000 taels, but in 1901 it sprang

to 438,000,000 taels, and has advanced nearly 150,000,000

taels within the past three years.[27]

[26] ``Returns of Trade for 1904,'' published by the Maritime Customs

Department of China.

[27] ``Returns of Trade for 1904,'' published by the Maritime Customs

Department of China.

The share of the United States is larger than one might infer

from the reports, as no inconsiderable part of our trade goes to

China by way of England and Hongkong and is often credited to

the British total instead of to ours. American trade has, moreover,

rapidly increased since 1900. We now sell more cotton

goods to China than to all other countries combined, the exports

having increased from $5,195,845 in 1898 to $27,000,000

in 1905.[28] In the year 1904, 63,529,623 gallons of kerosene

oil valued at $7,202,110 were shipped from the United States

to China. The development of the flour trade has been extraordinary,

the sales having risen from $89,305 in 1898 to

$5,360,139 in 1904.

[28] Year ending June, 1905.

In Hongkong, I found American flour controlling the

market. I learned on inquiry that years before, a firm in

Portland, Oregon, had sent an agent to introduce its flour.

The rice-eating Chinese did not want it, but the agent stayed,

gave away samples, explained its use and pushed his goods so

energetically and persistently that after years of labour and the

expenditure of tens of thousands of dollars a market was created.

Now that firm sells in such enormous quantities that its

numerous mills must run day and night to supply the demand,

and the annual profits run into six figures. That city of Portland

alone exported to Asia, chiefly China, in 1903:--

849,360 barrels flour $2,974,620

522,887 bushels wheat 413,901

46,847,975 feet lumber 647,355

Miscellaneous merchandise 352,879

-------

Total $4,414,651

While cotton goods, kerosene oil and flour are our chief exports

to China, there is a growing demand for many other

American products. The utility of the American locomotive

has become so apparent that in 1899, engines costing $732,212

were sent to China and additional orders are received every

few months. With the enormous forests bordering the Pacific

Ocean in the states of Oregon and Washington, and with the

development of cheap water transportation, there is a rapidly

widening market in China for American lumber. Eastern Asia

is too densely peopled to have large forests, and those she has

are not within easy reach. Native lumber, therefore, is scarce

and often small and crooked. That in common use comes

from Manchuria and Korea. I was impressed in Tsing-tau to

find that the Germans are using Oregon lumber and to be told

that it is considered the best, and in the long run, the cheapest.

Oregon pine costs more than the Korean and Manchurian, but

it is superior in size and quality. The transportation charges

to the interior, however, are a heavy addition. Manchurian

pine can be delivered at such an interior city as Wei-hsien, via

the junk port of Yang-chia-ko and thence by land, for twenty

dollars, gold, per thousand square feet, which is considerably

less than the Tsing-tau retail price for Asiatic lumber. Oregon

lumber costs in Shanghai, thirty-two dollars gold, per thousand,

but an importer estimated that it could be delivered at Tsingtau

for twenty-five dollars gold per thousand in large quantities.

The exports of the United States to China, according to the

reports of Consul-General Goodnow of Shanghai, increased

from $11,081,146 in 1900 to $18,175,484 in 1901 and $22,698,282

in 1902, while for 1904 they reached the total of about

$24,000,000, a gain of nearly 125 per cent. since 1900 and of

several hundred per cent. as compared with 1894.

Meantime, the United States imported from China goods to

the value of $30,872,244 in 1904, which is an increase of $14,255,956

over the imports for 1901. Silk and tea are the principal

items in this trade, the figures for the former being $10,220,543

and for the latter $7,294,570, though of goatskins we

took $2,556,541, wool $2,325,445, and matting $1,615,838.

The United States is now the third nation in trade relations

with China. This is the more remarkable when we consider

the statement of the late Mr. Everett Frazar of the American

Asiatic Association that in January, 1901, there were only four

American business firms in all China. When our business men

establish their own houses in China instead of dealing as now

through European and Chinese firms, it is not unreasonable to

expect that the United States will outstrip its larger rivals Great

Britain and France, though, as I have already intimated, it is

one thing to ship foreign goods to China and quite another

thing to control them after their arrival, for the Chinese are

disposed to manage that trade themselves and they know how

to do it.

Unfortunately the stream of foreign trade with China has

been contaminated by many of the vices which disgrace our

civilization. The pioneer traders were, as a rule, pirates and

adventurers, who cheated and abused the Chinese most flagrantly.

Gorst says that ``rapine, murder and a constant appeal

to force chiefly characterized the commencement of Europe's

commercial intercourse with China.'' There are many

men of high character engaged in business in the great cities

of China. I would not speak any disparaging word of those

who are worthy of all respect. But it is all too evident that

``many Americans and Europeans doing business in Asia are

living the life of the prodigal son who has not yet come to himself.''

Profane, intemperate, immoral, not living among the

Chinese, but segregating themselves in foreign communities in

the treaty ports, not speaking the Chinese language, frequently

beating and cursing those who are in their employ, regarding

the Chinese with hatred and contempt,--it is no wonder that

they are hated in return and that their conduct has done much

to justify the Chinese distrust of the foreigner. The foreign

settlements in the port cities of China are notorious for their

profligacy. Intemperance and immorality, gambling and Sabbath

desecration run riot. When after his return from a long

journey in Asia, the Rev. Dr. George Pentecost was asked--

``What are the darkest spots in the missionary outlook?'' he

replied:--

``In lands of spiritual darkness, it is difficult to speak of `darkest

spots.' I should say, however, that if there is a darkness more dark

than other darkness, it is that which is cast into heathen darkness

by the ungodliness of the American and European communities that

have invaded the East for the sake of trade and empire. The corruption

of Western godliness is the worst evil in the East. Of course there are

noble exceptions among western commercial men and their families, but

as a rule the European and American resident in the East is a constant

contradiction to all and everything which the missionary stands for.''

Most of the criticisms of missionaries which find their way

into the daily papers emanate from such men. The missionaries

do not gamble or drink whiskey, nor will their wives and

daughters attend or reciprocate entertainments at which wine,

cards and dancing are the chief features. So, of course, the

missionaries are ``canting hypocrites,'' and are believed to be

doing no good, because the foreigner who has never visited a

Chinese Christian Church, school or hospital in his life, does

not see the evidences of missionary work in his immediate

neighbourhood. The editor of the Japan Daily Mail justly

says:--[29]

[29] April 7, 1901

``We do not suggest that these newspapers which denounce the missionaries

so vehemently desire to be unjust or have any suspicion that they

are unjust. But we do assert that they have manifestly taken on the colour

of that section of every far eastern community whose units, for some

strange reason, entertain an inveterate prejudice against the missionary

and his works. Were it possible for these persons to give an intelligent

explanation of the dislike with which the missionary inspires them, their

opinions would command more respect. But they have never succeeded

in making any logical presentment of their case, and no choice offers except

to regard them as the victims of an antipathy which has no basis in

reason or reflection, That a man should be anti-Christian and should de-

vote his pen to propagating his views is strictly within his right, and we

must not be understood as suggesting that the smallest reproach attaches

to such a person. But on the other hand, it is within the right of the

missionary to protest against being arraigned before judges habitually hostile

to him, and it is within the right of the public to scrutinize the

pronouncements of such judges with much suspicion.''

Charles Darwin did not hesitate to put the matter more

bluntly still. He will surely not be deemed a prejudiced witness,

but he plainly said of the traders and travellers who attack

missionaries:--

``It is useless to argue against such reasoners. I believe that,

disappointed in not finding the field of licentiousness quite so open as

formerly, they will not give credit to a morality which they do not wish to

practice, or to a religion which they undervalue or despise.''

These facts are a suggestive commentary on the popular notion

that civilization should precede Christianity. The Rev. Dr.

James Stewart, the veteran missionary of South Africa, says that

it is an ``unpleasant and startling statement, unfortunately

true, that contact with European nations seems always to have

resulted in further deterioration of the African races. . . .

Trade and commerce have been on the West Coast of Africa

for more than three centuries. What have they made of that

region? Some of its tribes are more hopeless, more sunken

morally and socially, and rapidly becoming more commercially

valueless, than any tribes that may be found throughout the

whole of the continent. Mere commercial influence by its example

or its teaching during all that time has had little effect

on the cruelty and reckless shedding of blood and the human

sacrifices of the besotted paganism which still exists near that

coast.'' Of his experience in New Guinea, James Chalmers

declared:--``I have had twenty-one years' experience among

natives. I have lived with the Christian native, and I have

lived, and dined, and slept with cannibals. But I have never

yet met with a single man or woman, or with a single people,

that civilization without Christianity has civilized.''

Substantially similar statements might be made regarding

other lands.

``The more we open the world to what we call civilization, and the more

education we give it of the kind we call scientific, the greater are the

dangers to modern society, unless in some way we contrive to make all

the world better. Brigands armed with repeating rifles and supplied with

smokeless gunpowder are brigands still, but ten times more dangerous than

before. The vaste hordes of human beings in Asia and Africa, so long as

they are left in seclusion, are dangerous to their immediate neighbours;

but, when they have railroads, steamboats, tariffs, and machine guns, while

they retain their savage ideals and barbarous customs, they become dangerous

to all the rest of the world.''[30]

[30] Christian Register, December 3, 1903.

A Christless civilization is always and everywhere a curse

rather than a blessing. From the Garden of Eden down, the

fall of man has resulted from ``the increase of knowledge and

of power unaccompanied by reverence.... No evolution

is stable which neglects the moral factor or seeks to shake

itself free from the eternal duties of obedience and of faith.

. . . The Song of Lamech echoes from a remote antiquity

the savage truth that `the first results of civilization are to

equip hatred and render revenge more deadly, . . . a

savage exultation in the fresh power of vengeance which all the

novel instruments have placed in their inventor's hands.' ''[31]

[31] The Rev. Dr. George Adam Smith, D. D., ``Yale Lectures,'' pp. 95-97.

What is civilization without the gospel? The essential elements

of our civilization are the fruits of Christianity, and the

tree cannot be transplanted without its roots. Can a railroad

or a plow convert a man? They can add to his material comfort;

they can enlarge the opportunities of the gospel, but are

they the gospel itself? What does civilization without Christianity

mean? It means the lust of the European and American

soldiers which is rotting the native Hawaiians, the European and

American liquor which is debauching the Africans, the opium

which is enervating the Chinese, 6,000 tons a year coming from

India at a profit of $32,000,000 to the English Government.[32]

[32] The Rev. Dr. Henry van Dyke, Sermon.

How can such a civilization prepare the way for Christianity?

As a matter of fact, the Chinese already have a civilization,

and if our civilization is considered apart from its distinctively

Christian elements, it is not so much superior to the Chinese

as we are apt to imagine. The differences are chiefly matters

of taste and education. The truth is that always and everywhere,--

``civilization, so far from obliterating iniquity, imports into the world

iniquities of its own. It changes to some degree the aspects of iniquity, but

does not make them less. Further than that its effect is rather regularly

to dress iniquity in a less repulsive and more attractive form, and in that

way makes it more difficult to get rid of than before. There is no sin so

insinuating as refined and elegant sin, and of that civilization is the expert

patron and champion. The sin that is the devil's chief stock in trade

is not what is going on in Hester Street, but on the polite avenues.

. . . Evangelization conducts to civilization, but civilization has no

necessary bearing on evangelization; that is to say, there is in civilization

no energy inherently calculated to yield gospel facts. By carrying schools

and arts, trade and manufacture, among people that are now savages you

may be able to refine the quality of their deviltry, but that is not even

the first step towards making angels, or even saints of them.''[33]

[33] The Rev. Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, Sermon.

Lowell is said to have administered the following stinging

rebuke to the skeptical critics who sneered about missionaries

and declared the adequacy of civilization without them:--

``When the microscopic search of skepticism, which has hunted the

heavens and sounded the seas to disprove the existence of a Creator, has

turned its attention to human society and has found a place on this planet

ten miles square where a decent man can live in decency, comfort and

security, supporting and educating his children unspoiled and unpolluted;

a place where age is reverenced, manhood respected, womanhood honoured,

and human life held in due regard; when skeptics can find such

a place ten miles square on this globe where the gospel of Christ has

not gone and cleared the way, and laid the foundation and made decency

and security possible, it will then be in order for the skeptical literati

to move thither and there ventilate their views.''

But we may add Darwin's conjecture that ``should a voyager

chance to be at the point of shipwreck on some unknown

coast, he will devoutly pray that the lesson of the missionary

may have extended thus far.'' Bishop Thoburn says that no

nation without Christianity has ever advanced a step, and that

while in Washington there are 6,000 models of plows invented

by Americans, India is using the same plow as in the days of

David and Solomon. But wherever Christ's gospel goes, true

civilization appears. ``A better soul will soon make better

circumstances; but better circumstances will not necessarily make

a better soul.''[34]

[34] The Rev. Dr. James H. Snowden.

``We must be here to work,

And men who work can only work for men,

And not to work in vain must comprehend

Humanity, and so work humanly,

And raise men's bodies still by raising souls.''

XI

THE BUILDING OF RAILWAYS[35]

[35] Part of this chapter appeared as an article in the American Monthly

Review of Reviews, February, 1904.

THE extension of trade has naturally been accompanied

not only by the increase of foreign steamship

lines to the numerous port cities of China, but by the

development of almost innumerable coastwise and river vessels.

Many of these are owned and operated by the Chinese themselves,

but as steamers came with the foreigners and as they

drive out the native junks and bring beggary to their owners,

the masses of the Chinese cannot be expected to feel kindly

towards such competition, however desirable the steamer may

appear to be from the view-point of a more disinterested

observer. But this interference with native customs has been far

less revolutionary than that of the railways.

The pressure of foreign commerce upon China has naturally

resulted in demands for concessions to build railways, in order

that the country might be opened up for traffic and the products

of the interior be more easily and quickly brought to the coast.

The first railroad in China was built by British promoters in

1876. It ran from Shanghai to Woosung, only fourteen miles.

Great was the excitement of the populace, and no sooner was

it completed than the Government bought it, tore up the road-

bed, and dumped the engines into the river. That ended

railway-building till 1881, when, largely through the influence

of Wu Ting-fang, late Chinese Minister to the United States,

the Chinese themselves, under the guidance of an English

engineer, built a little line from the Kai-ping coal mines to

Taku, at the mouth of the Pei-ho River and the ocean gate

way to the capital. Seeing the benefit of this road, the Chinese

raised further funds, borrowed more from the English, and

gradually extended it 144 miles to Shan-hai Kwan on the

north, while they ran another line to Tien-tsin, twenty-seven

miles from Tong-ku, and thence onward seventy-nine miles

direct to Peking. This system forms the Imperial Railway and

belongs to the Chinese Government, though bonds are held by

the English, who loaned money for construction, and though

English and American engineers built and superintended the

system. The local staff, however, is Chinese.

No more concessions were granted to foreigners till 1895,

but then they were given so rapidly that, in 1899 when the

Boxer Society first began to attract attention, there were, including

the Imperial Railway, not only 566 miles in operation,

but 6,000 miles were projected, and engineers were surveying

rights of way through whole provinces. Much of the completed

work was undone during the destructive madness of the

Boxer uprising, but reconstruction began as soon as the tumult

was quelled. According to the Archiv fur Eisenbahnwesen of

Germany, the total length of the railways in use in 1903 in

China was 1,236 kilometers or about 742 miles.

Several foreign nations have taken an aggressive part in this

movement. In the north, Russia, not satisfied with a terminus

at cold Vladivostok where ice closes the harbour nearly half

the year, steadily demanded concessions which would enable

her Trans-Siberian Railway to reach an ice-free winter port,

and thus give her a commanding position in the Pacific and a

channel through which the trade of northern Asia might reach

and enrich Russia's vast possessions in Siberia and Europe.

So Russian diplomacy rested not till it had secured the right to

extend the Trans-Siberian Railway southward from Sungari

through Manchuria to Tachi-chao near Mukden. From there

one branch runs southward to Port Arthur and Dalny and

another southwestward to Shan-hai Kwan, where the great

Wall of China touches the sea. As connection is made at that

point with the Imperial Railway to Taku, Tien-tsin and Peking,

Moscow 5,746 miles away, is brought within seventeen days of

Peking. Thus, Russian influence had an almost unrestricted

entrance to China on the North, while a third branch from

Mukden to Wiju, on the Korean frontier, will connect with a

projected line running from that point southward to Seoul, the

capital of Korea. A St. Petersburg dispatch, dated November

26, 1903, states that a survey has just been completed from

Kiakhta, Siberia, to Peking by way of Gugon, a distance of

about a thousand miles. This road, if built, will give the Russians

a short cut direct to the capital.

In the populous province of Shantung, a German railroad,

opened April 8, 1901, runs from Tsing-tau on Kiao-chou Bay

into the heart of the populous Shantung Province via Weihsien.

The line already reaches the capital, Chinan-fu, while

ulterior plans include a line from Tsing-tau via Ichou-fu to

Chinan-fu, so that German lines will ere long completely encircle

this mighty Province. At Chinan-fu, this road will meet

another great trunk line, partly German and partly English,

which is being pushed southward from Tien-tsin to Chin-kiang.

An English sydicate, known as the British-Chinese Corporation,

is to control a route from Shanghai via Soochow and

Chin-kiang to Nanking and Soochow via Hangchow to Ningpo,

while the Anglo-Chinese Railway Syndicate of London is said

to be planning a railway from Canton to Cheng-tu-fu, the provincial

capital of Sze-chuen. Meanwhile, the original line from

Shanghai to Wu-sung has been reconstructed by the English.

One of the most valuable concessions in China has been obtained

by the Anglo-Italian Syndicate in the Provinces of

Shan-si and Shen-si for it gives the right to construct railways

and to operate coal mines in a region where some of the most

extensive anthracite deposits in the world are located. A beginning

has already been made, and when the lines are completed,

the industrial revolution in China will be mightily advanced.

An alleged Belgian syndicate, to which was formed with then

wholly disinterested assistance of the French and Russian legations,

obtained in 1896 a concession to construct the Lu Han

Railway from Peking 750 miles southward to Hankow, the

commercial metropolis on the middle Yang-tze River. It is significant,

however, that while the Belgian syndicate was temporarily

embarrassed, the Russo-Chinese Bank of Peking aided

the Chinese Director-General of Railways to begin the section

running from Peking to Paoting-fu. The road is open to

Shunte-fu, 300 miles south of Peking and to Hsu-chou, 434

kilometers north of Hankow. The Russo-Chinese Bank is

building a branch line from Ching-ting via Tai-yuen-fu to Singan-fu

in Shen-si, where it will be well started on the beaten

caravan route between north China and Russian Central Asia.

On November 13, 1903, the Belgian International Eastern

Company signed a contract to construct a railway from Kai-

feng-fu, the capital of the Province of Honan, 110 miles west

to Honan-fu.

I found the line running south from Peking well-built with

solid road-bed, massive stone culverts, iron bridges, and heavy

steel rails. The first and second class coaches are not attractive

in appearance, and though the fare for the former is double

that of the latter, the chief discernible difference is that in the

first class compartment, which is usually in one end of a second-

class car, the seats are curved and the passengers fewer in

number, while in the second-class the seats are straight boards

and are apt to be crowded with Chinese coolies. Neither class

is upholstered and neither would be considered comfortable in

America, but after the weeks I had spent in a mule-litter, anything

on rails seemed luxurious. Our train was a mixed one,--

the first-class compartments containing a few French officers,

the second-class filled with Chinese coolies and French soldiers,

while a half-dozen flat cars were loaded with horses and mules.

A large Roger's locomotive from Paterson, New Jersey, drew

our long train smoothly and easily, though the schedule was so

slow and the stops so long that we were seven hours and a half

in making a run of a hundred miles.

Railway-building in South China, outside of French territory,

began with a line from Canton to Hankow which was projected

in 1895 by Senator Calvin S. Brice, William Barclay

Parsons being the engineer. The usual governmental difficulties

were encountered, but in 1902 an imperial decree gave the

concession to the American-China Development Company.

American capital was to finance the road, though with some

European aid. The company had the power, under its concession,

to issue fifty-year five per cent. gold bonds to the amount

of $42,500,000, the interest being guaranteed by the Chinese

Government. The main line will be 700 miles long, and

branches will increase the total mileage to 900. On November

15, 1903, a section ten miles long from Canton to Fat-shan was

formally opened for traffic in the presence of the Hon. Francis

May, colonial secretary and registrar-general of the Hongkong

Government, a large number of Europeans and Americans, and

immense crowds of Chinese who manifested their excitement by

an almost incessant rattle of fire-crackers. By October, 1904,

trains were running regularly to Sam-shui, about twenty-five

miles beyond Fat-shan. This is a branch line. The main

line will run on the other side of the West River. In 1905,

the government decided to complete the line itself and cancelled

the concession, paying the company as indemnity $6,750,000.

A line from Kowloon to Canton has been planned for some

time and it is likely to be hastened by the announcement in the

South China Morning Post, May 12, 1904, that an American-

Chinese syndicate had obtained a concession, granted to the

authorities of Macao by China through a special Portuguese

Minister, to construct a railway from Macao to Canton. The

syndicate hopes to secure American capital and the British

merchants of Hongkong are a little nervous as they think of the

possibility of an independent outlet for the Canton-Hankow

Railway at Macao.

It will thus be seen that if these vast schemes can be realized

there will not only be numerous lines running from the

coast into the interior, but a great trunk line from Canton

through the very heart of the Empire to Peking, where other

roads can be taken not only to Manchuria and Korea but to

any part of Europe.

In the farther south, the French are equally busy. By the

Franco-Chinese Convention of June 20, 1895, a French

company secured the right to construct a railroad from Lao-

kai to Yun-nan-fu. The French had a road from Hai-fong in

Tong-king to Sang-chou at the Chinese frontier, and in 1896

they obtained from China a concession to extend it to Nanning-

fu, on the West River. This privilege has since been enlarged

so that the line will be continued to the treaty port of Pak-hoi

on the Gulf of Tong-king. The French fondly dream of the

time when they can extend their Yun-nan Railway northward

till it taps and makes tributary to French Indo-China the vast

and fertile valley of the upper Yang-tze River. Meanwhile,

the English talk of a line from Kowloon, opposite Hongkong,

to Canton, and of connecting their Burma Railroad, which

already runs from Rangoon to Kun-long ferry, with the

Yang-tze valley, so that the enormous trade of southern interior

China may not flow into a French port, as the French so

ardently desire, but into an English city.

It would be impossible to describe adequately the far-

reaching effect upon China and the Chinese of this extension of

modern railways. We have had an illustration of its meaning

in America, where the transcontinental railroads resulted in

the amazing development of our western plains and of the

Pacific Coast. The effect of such a development in China can

hardly be overestimated, for China has more than ten times the

population of the trans-Mississippi region while its territory is

vaster and equally rich in natural resources. As I travelled

through the land, it seemed to me that almost the whole

northern part of the Empire was composed of illimitable fields

of wheat and millet, and that in the south the millions of paddy

plots formed a rice-field of continental proportions. Hidden

away in China's mountains and underlying her boundless

plateaus are immense deposits of coal and iron; while above

any other country on the globe, China has the labour for the

development of agriculture and manufacture. Think of the

influence not only upon the Chinese but the whole world,

when railroads not only carry the corn of Hunan to the famine

sufferers in Shantung, but when they bring the coal, iron and

other products of Chinese soil and industry within reach of

steamship lines running to Europe and America. To make

all these resources available to the rest of the world, and in turn

to introduce among the 426,000,000 of the Chinese the products

and inventions of Europe and America, is to bring about

an economic transformation of stupendous proportions.

Imagine, too, what changes are involved in the substitution

of the locomotive for the coolie as a motive power, the

freight car for the wheelbarrow in the shipment of produce,

and the passenger coach for the cart and the mule-litter in the

transportation of people. Railways will inevitably inaugurate

in China a new era, and when a new era is inaugurated for

one-third of the human race the other two-thirds are certain to

be affected in many ways.

That the transformation is attended by outbreaks of violence

is natural enough. Even such a people as the English and the

Scotch were at first inimical to railroads, and it is notorious

that the great Stephenson had to meet not only ridicule but

strenuous opposition. Everybody knows, too, that in the

United States stage companies and stage drivers did all they

could to prevent the building of railroads, and that learned

gentlemen made eloquent speeches which proved to the entire

satisfaction of their authors that railways would disarrange all

the conditions of society and business and bring untold evils

in their train. If the alert and progressive Anglo-Saxon took

this initial position, is it surprising that it should be taken with

far greater intensity by Orientals who for uncounted centuries

have plodded along in perfect contentment, and who now find

that the whole order of living to which they and their fathers

have become adapted is being shaken to its foundation by the

iron horse of the foreigner? Millions of coolies earn a living

by carrying merchandise in baskets or wheeling it in barrows

at five cents a day. A single railroad train does the work of a

thousand coolies, and thus deprives them of their means of

support. Myriads of farmers grew the beans and peanuts out

of which illuminating oil was made. But since American

kerosene was introduced in 1864, its use has become well-nigh

universal, and the families who depended upon the bean-oil and

peanut-oil market are starving. Cotton clothing is generally

worn in China, except by the better classes, and China

formerly made her own cotton cloth. Now American manufacturers

can sell cotton in China cheaper than the Chinese can

make it themselves.

All this is, of course, inevitable. It is indeed for the best interests

of the people of China themselves, but it enables us to

understand why so many of the Chinese resent the introduction

of foreign goods. That much of this business is passing into

the hands of the Chinese themselves does not help the matter,

for the people know that the goods are foreign, and that the

foreigners are responsible for their introduction.

Nor are racial prejudices and vested interests the only foes

which the railway has to encounter in China. As we have

seen, the Chinese, while not very religious, are very superstitious.

They people the earth and air with spirits, who, in their

judgment, have baleful power over man. Before these spirits

they tremble in terror, and no inconsiderable part of their

time and labour is devoted to outwitting them, for the Chinese

do not worship the spirits, except to propitiate and deceive

them. They believe that the spirits cannot turn a corner, but

must move in a straight line. Accordingly, in China you do

not often find one window opposite another window, lest the

spirits may pass through. You will seldom find a straight

road from one village to another village, but only a distractingly

circuitous path, while the roads are not only crooked, but

so atrociously bad that it is difficult for the foreign traveller to

keep his temper. The Chinese do not count their own inconvenience

if they can only baffle their demoniac foes. It is the

custom of the Chinese to bury their dead wherever a geomancer

indicates a ``lucky'' place. So particular are they about

this that the bodies of the wealthy are often kept for a considerable

period while a suitable place of interment is being

found. In Canton there is a spacious enclosure where the

coffins sometimes lie for years, each in a room more or less

elaborate according to the taste or ability of the family. The

place once chosen immediately becomes sacred. In a land

which has been so densely populated for thousands of years,

graves are therefore not only innumerable but omnipresent.

In my travels in China, I was hardly ever out of sight of these

conical mounds of the dead, and as a rule I could count hundreds

of them from my shendza.

Every visitor to Canton and Chefoo will recall the hilly

regions just outside of the old city walls that are literally covered

with graves, those of the richer classes being marked by

small stone or brick amphitheatres. Yet these are cemeteries

not because they have been set apart for that purpose, but because

graves have gradually filled all available spaces.

The Chinese reverence their dead and venerate the spots in

which they lie. From a Chinese view-point it is an awful thing

to desecrate them. Not only property and those sacred feelings

with which all peoples regard their dead are involved but

also the vital religious question of ancestral worship. Accordingly

Chinese law protects all graves by heavy sanctions, imposing

the death penalty by strangling on the malefactor who

opens a grave without the permission of the owner, and by decapitation

if in doing so the coffin is opened or broken so as

to expose the body to view. Imagine then their feelings

when they see haughty foreigners run a railroad straight as an

arrow from city to city, opening a highway over which the

dreaded spirits may run, and ruthlessly tearing through the

tombs hallowed by the most sacred associations.

No degree of care can avoid the irritations caused by railway

construction. In building the line from Tsing-tau to Kiao-chou,

a distance of forty-six miles, the Germans, as far as practicable,

ran around the places most thickly covered with graves.

But in spite of this, no less than 3,000 graves had to be removed.

It was impossible to settle with the individual owners,

as it was difficult in many cases to ascertain who they were,

most of the graves being unmarked, and some of the families

concerned having died out or moved away. Moreover, the

Oriental has no idea of time, and dearly loves to haggle,

especially with a foreigner whom he feels no compunction in

swindling. So the railway company made its negotiations

with the local magistrates, showing them the routes, indicating

the graves that were in the way, and paying them an

average of $3 (Mexican) for removing each grave, they to

find and settle with the owners. This was believed to be fair,

for $3 is a large sum where the coin in common circulation

is the copper ``cash,'' so small in value that 1,600 of them

equal a gold dollar, and where a few dozen cash will buy a

day's food for an adult. But while some of the Chinese were

glad to accept this arrangement, others were not. They wanted

more, or they had special affection for the dead, or that particular

spot had been carefully selected because it was favoured

by the spirits. Besides, the magistrates doubtless kept a part

of the price as their share. Chinese officials are underpaid,

are expected to ``squeeze'' commissions, and no funds can

pass through their hands without a percentage of loss. Then,

as the Asiatic is very deliberate, the company was obliged to

specify a date by which all designated graves must be removed.

As many of the bodies were not taken up within that time,

the company had to remove them.

In these circumstances, we should not be surprised that

some of the most furiously anti-foreign feeling in China was in

the villages along the line of that railroad. Why should the

hated foreigner force his line through their country when the

people did not want it? Of course, it would save time, but,

as an official naively said, ``We are not in a hurry.'' So the

villagers watched the construction with ill-concealed anger,

and to-day that railroad, as well as most other railroads in

North China, can only be kept open by detachments of foreign

soldiers at all the important stations. I saw them at almost

every stop,--German soldiers from Tsing-tau to Kiao-chou,

British from Tong-ku to Peking, French from Peking to Paoting-fu,

etc.

Nevertheless, railways in China are usually profitable. It is

true that the opposition to the building of a railroad is apt to

be bitter, that mobs are occasionally destructive, and that locomotives

and other rolling stock rapidly deteriorate under native

handling unless closely watched by foreign superintendents.

But, on the other hand, the Government is usually forced to

pay indemnities for losses resulting from violence. The road,

too, once built, is in time appreciated by the thrifty Chinese,

who swallow their prejudices and patronize it in such enormous

numbers, and ship by it such quantities of their produce, that

the business speedily becomes remunerative, while the population

and the resources of the country are so great as to afford

almost unlimited opportunity for the development of traffic.

As a rule, on all the roads, the first-class compartments,

when there are any, have comparatively few passengers, chiefly

officials and foreigners. The second-class cars are well filled

with respectable-looking people, who are apparently small merchants,

students, minor officials, etc. The third-class cars,

which are usually more numerous, are packed with chattering

peasants. The first-class fares are about the same as ordinary

rates in the United States. The second-class are about half

the first-class rates, and the third-class are often less than the

equivalent of a cent a mile. This is a wise adjustment in a

land where the average man is so thrifty and so poor that he

would not and could not pay a price which would be deemed

moderate in America, and where his scale of living makes him

content with the rudest accommodations. Very little baggage

is carried free, twenty pounds only on the German lines, so

that excess baggage charges amount to more than in America.

The freight cars, during my visit, were, for the most part,

loaded with the materials and supplies necessitated by the work

of railway-construction and by the extensive rebuilding of the

native and foreign property which had been destroyed by the

Boxers. But in normal conditions the railways carry inland a

large number of foreign manufactured articles, and in turn

bring to the ports the wheat, rice, peanuts, ore, coal, pelts,

silk, wool, cotton, matting, paper, straw-braid, earthenware,

sugar, tea, tobacco, fireworks, fruit, vegetables, and other

products of the interior. Short hauls are the rule, thus far,

both for passengers and freight. This is partly because the

long-distance lines within the Empire are not yet completed,

and partly because the typical Chinese of the lower classes in

the interior provinces has never been a score of miles away from

his native village in his life, and has been so accustomed to

regard a wheelbarrow trip of a dozen miles as a long journey

that he is a little cautious, at first, in lengthening his radius of

movement. But he soon learns, especially as the struggle for

existence in an overcrowded country begets a desire to take advantage

of an opportunity to better his condition elsewhere.

Once fairly started, he is apt to go far, as the numbers of

Chinese in Siam, the Philippines, and America clearly show.

The literary and official classes are less apt to go abroad, but

they are more accustomed to moving about within the limits

of the Empire, as they must go to the central cities for their

examinations, and as offices are held for such short terms that

magistrates are frequently shifted from province to province.

When this vast population of naturally industrious and commer-

cial people becomes accustomed to railways and gets to moving

freely upon them, stupendous things are likely to happen,

both for China and for the world.

And so the foreign syndicates relentlessly continue the work

of railway-construction. Trade cannot be checked. It advances

by an inherent energy which it is futile to ignore. And

it ought to advance for the result will inevitably be to the advantage

of China. A locomotive brings intellectual and physical

benefits, the appliances which mitigate the poverty and

barrenness of existence and increase the ability to provide for

the necessities and the comforts of life. In one of our great

locomotive works in America I once saw twelve engines in construction

for China, and my imagination kindled as I thought

what a locomotive means amid that stagnant swarm of humanity,

how impossible it is that any village through which it has

once run should continue to be what it was before, how its

whistle puts to flight a whole brood of hoary superstitions and

summons a long-slumbering people to new life. We need regret

only that these benefits are so often accompanied by the

evils which disgrace our civilization.